The Australian Academy of the Humanities is pleased to be joining forces with Australia’s other Learned Academies to launch the COVID-19 Expert Database.

The database provides access to Australia’s leading researchers and experts across all disciplines who are willing and able to help Australia tackle COVID-19 and its aftermath. Envisaged as a publicly available searchable database, it will provide a starting point for governments, industry, education, the research sector, the media, and the community to easily connect with expertise.

Championed by Australia’s Chief Scientist, Dr Alan Finkel AO, the database is an initiative of Australia’s Learned Academies – the Australian Academy of the Humanities, Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences, Australian Academy of Science, Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering, Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, and the Australian Council of Learned Academies – to ensure that multidisciplinary expertise is brought to bear on this issue of critical national importance.

We encourage Academy Fellows and humanities researchers across all career stages to register, especially those with expertise across ethical, historical and cultural approaches to pandemic or epidemic management, crisis recovery and communication.

Call for humanities expertise

This initiative complements the Academy’s call for expertise issued last week, which seeks to support our advice to government and inform policy directions. We are keen to hear from humanities researchers working in areas including (but not limited to):

-lessons from past experiences of epidemics, pandemics and quarantine;
-community responses to the COVID-19 crisis;
-social distancing challenges for Indigenous communities and other cultural impacts;
-access and equity to essential services, including digital communications and technologies;
-ethical decision-making;
-translation and analysis of information for multilingual populations; and
-the role of arts and culture in community building, recovery and resilience.

We invite you to complete this confidential online form, outlining your research speciality across these areas.